Otterbein UMC

Worship,service, 10-18-2020, Pastor Deborah preaching, Psalm 121 "Gov is holding your life."

This is not good! https://www.cbsnews.com//covid-19-can-survive-28-days-on-/

Celebrating Laity Sunday, Lay Leader Dianne Maylen preaching

In the fall of 1920, the Ku Klux Klan marched toward a boarding school for black girls in Daytona, Florida. The black school teacher there had been registering ...and mobilizing black voters. The school teacher stood her ground. Two years later, the Klan returned again, ahead of the 1922 elections, as over 100 robed figures carrying banners emblazoned with the words ‘white supremacy’ marched on the school in retaliation against [the school teacher’s] continued efforts to get black women to the polls, according to the Smithsonian Magazine. Again, the school teacher stood her ground. If night riders thought they could frighten [the school teacher], they were wrong, according to writer Martha S. Jones. The school teacher’s unshakable devotion to equality would eventually outlast the mobs that stood in her way. A champion of racial and gender equality, [Mary McLeod] Bethune founded many organizations and led voter registration drives after women gained the vote in 1920, risking racist attacks, according to the National Women’s History Museum. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was born in 1875 in a log cabin on a cotton farm in Mayesville, South Carolina. This is part of a continuing series this month on the Peace Page, revisiting Peace Page favorites and sharing awareness on the importance of voting. South Carolina is one of five states whose registration deadline for voting is October 4. The other states are Alaska, Montana, Utah, and Rhode Island. Florida’s deadline for registering is October 5. You can Google registration and voting information for your community or access your info on Facebook. Mary McLeod Bethune was the 15th of 17 children raised by her parents in the Reconstruction-era South and the first of the children to be born free, according to the Palm Beach Post. She came into the world withobstacles scattered across the path she was about to travel, wrote Eileen Zaffiro-Kean of The Daytona Beach News-Journal. She was female, and she was Black. Slavery and the Civil War had just ended 10 years earlier. Her mother and grandmother had been born enslaved. In 1875 in South Carolina, the state’s 1868 constitution guaranteed equal rights to black citizens, many of them formerly enslaved people. Black men joined political parties, voted and held public office . . . [but] this period of tenuous equality was soon crushed, and by 1895, a white-led regime had used intimidation and violence to retake control of lawmaking in South Carolina, as it had in other Southern states, and a new state constitution kept black citizens from the polls by imposing literacy tests and property qualifications according to the Smithsonian. Even today there continues to be news regarding voter suppression, misinformation, and intimidation, especially in majority-Black and urban areas, such as in the news headline October 1, reported by the Associated Press where citizens were told that voting by mail in the Nov. 3 election could subject people to arrest, debt collection and forced vaccination. Early on, Mary would accompany her mother to the homes of white people where they would deliver laundry, according to the Palm Beach Post. On one occasion, a young Mary picked up a book but as she opened it, a white child took it away from her, saying Mary didn't know how to read. Mary decided the only difference between the races was the ability to read and write. So, she set out to get an education. She was toiling in the cotton fields by the time she was five years old, but a year later her parents agreed to give up the extra set of helping hands so she could go to the one-room school a few miles away, according to The Daytona Beach News-Journal. She became the first person in her family to learn to read and write. After completing studies at Scotia Seminary and, in 1895, at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Bethune took a teaching post in Augusta, Georgia, and dedicated herself to educating black children in spite of the barriers that Jim Crow set in their way, according to Jones. Mary [also] studied at the Scotia Seminary for girls, which is now historically Black Barber-Scotia College, in Concord, North Carolina, according to the South Carolina Hall of Fame. After years teaching in Georgia and South Carolina, Mary decided she wanted a school of her own. She moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, and with just one dollar, and fifty cents ($1.50), built The Bethune Institute for Girls, which later merged with the nearby Cookman Institute for Boys, and became what we know today, as historically Black Bethune-Cookman University. When the Peace Page shared that chapter of Bethune’s life in July 2019, it quickly went viral, continuing to trend even today, reaching more than 1 million readers on Facebook. Bethune would parlay her rural South education into a career that led to her founding and running a college, and becoming an advisor to U.S. presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote Zaffiro-Kean. She even opened in 1911 the region’s first hospital for black citizens , McLeod Hospital, named for her parents. Aspiring nurses received hands-on training and provided care to the needy, not least during the 1918 influenza pandemic, according to the Smithsonian. Her legacy is already cemented in history, but it will be further etched in granite when a statue of her is placed in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol as a representative of Florida, according to the Palm Beach Post. "The statue will be the first African American, male or female, to reside in Statuary Hall in the state collection and the only statue of a person in a cap and gown, representing Mary McLeod Bethune’s commitment to education," said Nancy Lohman, chair of the local nonprofit Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Statuary Fund. Bethune continues to galvanize black women, as Florida Representative Val Demings explained in celebrating Bethune's selection for the Capitol: Mary McLeod Bethune was the most powerful woman I can remember as a child. She has been an inspiration throughout my whole life. I think her legacy speaks for itself, said Tasha Lucas-Youmans, dean of the Carl S. Swisher Library on the Bethune-Cookman campus. Words cannot describe what she has done and I don’t know another woman who was able to do what she did during that time in history, but she did it. "Our country needs Mary McLeod Bethune and her words of wisdom now as much as ever," Lohman said. "In her last will and testament, a beautiful doctrine that is so relevant still today, she included these sentiments: I leave you love, hope, faith, racial dignity, a thirst for education, courage, peace and the desire to live harmoniously with others.

World Communion Sunday 10-4-2020, Matthew 22:1-14 "Be my guest." Pastor Deborah preaching

9-27-2020 "Solid Rock" by Pastor Deborah, Exodus 17:1-7

Worship service recording for 9-20-2020, Pastor Deborah Preaching on Exodus 16:2-15, "Packing Light."

Worship service 9-13-2020, Pastor Deborah Preaching "Practicing Forgiveness" Matthew 18:21-35 #hymnsing #Forgivensess #OtterbeinUMCPA

important information